Borsa Italiana will introduce its new MillenniumIT trading platform on 25 June, bringing the Italian stock market onto the same platform used by the London Stock Exchange (LSE) since February 2011.
Timed to coincide with the return of the exchange’s matching engine from London to Milan, the move will also reunite Borsa Italiana’s equities engine with its IDEM derivatives segment, which had always stayed in Milan. According to the exchange, this should increase opportunities for cross-market arbitrage, allowing clients to trade off price differences between cash equities and index derivatives.
The markets that will be moved onto the new MillenniumIT system include Borsa Italiana's main stock market Mercato Azionario, the MTA International segment dedicated to shares issued by non-Italian issuers listed in other EU markets, the Mercato degli Investment Vehicles, the AIM and MAC markets for small and medium enterprises, the ETFPlus market for exchange-traded funds, the SEDEX market data service, and bond platforms MOT, EuroMOT and ExtraMot.
“We want to move the matching engine to where the greatest source of liquidity is,” Gabriele Villa, equity and derivative markets, Borsa Italiana, told theTRADEnews.com last October. “Most of the liquidity in equities trading on Borsa Italiana is driven by Italian and co-located international clients, and we feel this move will significantly improve the service we offer those clients.”
Borsa Italiana will hope to avoid the teething troubles experienced by the LSE during the migration of its UK market last year and multilateral trading facility Turquoise in 2010. On 5 October, the first day of Turquoise’s operation on Millennium Exchange, the market open was delayed for an hour and 15 minutes. This was followed by a further glitch on 2 November, while at the end of February 2011, a data dissemination problem shut down trading on the LSE’s main market for four hours.